Furious 7 is So Beautiful It Reduced Me to Tears

Seriously, though. Pablo's passing has got me feeling all the feels

Well, it finally happened. 

It took seven movies but the Fast and the Furious has officially made me cry. True, it took offscreen trauma to do so but I choked up at the end of Furious 7, the SIXTH sequel to the 2001 exploitation movie The Fast and the Furious and then I started crying. 

Over the course of seven movies I went from seeing Paul Walker as hopelessly inadequate as an actor, leading man and action hero to being so moved by his death that seeing the franchise obliquely reference his demise reduced me to tears. 

These films have taken me on a journey! It began, modestly enough, with a glorified b-movie about an undercover cop infiltrating the Los Angeles drag racing scene in pursuit of thrill seeking car-jackers. It grew in size and scope until it was a big-budget, globe-trotting spectacular that tugs relentlessly and effectively at the heartstrings of moviegoers the world over. 

This is going to sound crazy, but when Paul Walker and, by extension, the character he plays in these movies, cast off his mortal coil and headed to the big freeway in the sky it almost felt like I was losing a family member. 

Furious 7 has nearly identical critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Eighty one percent of snooty, high falutin’ critics who think they’re SO GREAT and KNOW EVERYTHING were solidly behind the sixth sequel to a silly b movie about giant men who like to go fast that didn’t exactly sweep the Oscars.

That in itself is remarkable. Movies like Furious 7 are not supposed to be critically acclaimed. Yet the movie was hailed by critics and audiences alike. Percentage-wise, audiences only liked the quintessential movie made for fans slightly more than critics did. 

At some point the Fast and the Furious movies got REALLY good. Specifically, Furious 7 is the sequel where the franchise found itself and its voice. 

With Furious 7 this absurdly overachieving and just plain absurd franchise finally achieved its dream of out James Bonding the James Bond franchise.

Of course Diesel already has ANOTHER aggressively multi-cultural franchise devoted to out James Bonding James Bond in the XXX movies. Alas XXX’s attempts to be James Bond for a totally extreme generation of Red Bull-chugging snowboarding maniacs only made it seem lame and pathetic. 

Furious 7, in sharp contrast, does not make the fatal rookie mistake of trying way too hard to convince audiences that its characters are historic, world-class badasses. 

This is instead done through the magic of casting. Cast Jason Statham as your bad guy and audiences know from his first moment onscreen that he is a legendary badass who could probably beat you death with his bare hands, then enjoy a nice cup of tea. 

We know Jason Statham through his work and his many films, most notably the Crank movies. Boy are those movies great. They’re some of my favorites but if I might give Furious 7 some very high praise it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Neveldine/Taylor’s badass masterpieces when discussing transcendently over-the-top macho spectacles. 

Another excellent way to establish that a character is cool and impressive and someone you would DEFINITELY someone you love to hang out with is by casting literally THE COOLEST MAN IN THE WORLD for the part. 

Furious 7 adds Kurt Russell, who I think we can all agree is the coolest man in the world and has been for decades, in the key new role of Mr. Nobody, an enigmatic government operative who tells the family that he can help them get Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the big baddie who killed Han for the sixth or seventh time, if they help his shadowy organization retrieve an all-seeing, all-powerful surveillance device grandiosely monikered God’s Eye along with its hacker creator Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel). 

I’m a bit of a dullard and am easily confused by the plots of blockbuster films so I appreciate the child-like simplicity of Furious 7’s plot and how it’s mainly a thinly veiled excuse to send cars soaring to the sky like majestic birds in flagrant defiance of all that we know about gravity. 

At this point in my Fast and Furious journey Stockholm syndrome is starting to set in. I actually find myself enjoying the comic stylings of Tyrese Gibson as Roman, the playboy and funnyman of the family. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he has the kind of humor I have grown to know and tolerate. 

While I still think it’s a bit of a waste to make Tyrese the funny one instead of Ludacris, who is naturally funny and charismatic, I have come to appreciate the professionalism the rapper turned actor brings to the role. 

If all Ludacris gets to do in these movies is deliver exposition and spout technical jargon at least he does so as forcefully and convincingly as possible. Ludacris is the archetypal performer so entertaining you could watch him read the phone book. These movies don’t give Luda much more than that to work with but he makes the most of the scraps that he’s been given. 

I’ve gone from thinking that Paul Walker was the franchise’s big weakness to literally sobbing at the idea of him not being a part of it anymore. 

It’s all so sad! They weren’t just an unusually tight-knit group of actors. They were, in a very real way, family. Walker was like a brother to Diesel. 

Early in Furious 7 Brian’s son throws a toy car, leading his amused father to quip, “cars don’t fly.” 

The rest of Furious 7 is devoted to proving him wrong. 

“You’ll believe a man can fly” famously promised the tagline for 1978’s Superman. 

In the same spirit, the tagline for Furious 7 could be “You’ll believe a car can fly.” 

Cars do all manner of flying in Furious 7. There are so many flying automobiles in this most magical of motion pictures that you’ll swear it was secretly a test balloon for a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang reboot. 

Race Wars! Race Wars! Race Wars! Oh wait.

Cars fly when the family flies their cars OUT OF A MOTHERFUCKING PLANE with parachutes and shit. 

Is that at all possible? Can cars actually do that? Can the strongest parachute hold an automobile that weighs thousands of pounds as it plummets thousands of miles in the air? 

I have no idea but I know someone who does. His name is Neil LaGrasse Tyson and he does this really cool thing where he points out that movies that are clearly made up fantasies are not always scientifically accurate. 

Tyson was the science advisor on Furious 7. He was the one who made sure that everything was, if anything, excessively realistic. He’s the one who first flew his muscle car out of a cargo plane with a parachute to make sure that it was not just possible but extremely safe, even boring. 

Later, in what can only be deemed a towering moment for western civilization as a whole, Dom and Brian find themselves inside a powerful sports car with no brakes high up in a skyscraper apartment building in the Middle East and literally crash from one building to another without dying horrible deaths in the process. 

Again, Tyson actually did that shit to make sure it passed the most stringent standards of realism and verisimilitude. 

But it’s all just a build up to the gloriously preposterous moment when Dom launches his car at a motherfucking drone and takes it down—WITH HIS CAR—without dying in the process.

Furious 7’s airborne automotive wizardry delighted both my inner child and stoned adult. The series keeps pushing itself and pushing itself in terms of spectacle, size, scope and stunts. The series’ breathless bigness reaches its pinnacle here. 

The franchise has exhibited a weakness for casting the hottest new thing in action for roles of varying size and significance. That continues with the opportunistic casting of MMA superstar and Entourage movie supporting player Ronda Rousey as the head of security for an Abu Dhabi billionaire. 

Rousey has an ideal role in that she has about three lines of dialogue and four minutes of screen time she spends mostly fighting, all of which plays to her very limited skill set as an actress. 

International badass Tony Jaa is on hand as a sort of bonus action hero, a secondary bad guy who gets to showcase his  more impressive skill set as a martial artist in a fight with Brian. 

And of course there’s the obligatory scene where they shoe-horn in a drag race as a nod to the series’ roots and we get more wonderful low-angle shots of the mini-skirt-clad posteriors of the beautiful women who gravitate to the sweaty glamour of the drag race scene. 

Furious 7 ends by obliquely acknowledging Paul Walker’s death despite Brian still being alive within the film’s wacky world.

In this macho realm of vulgar make believe Brian just took a step back from his professional family to take care of his wife and children. In movies death does not have to be real. 

As Han would be the first to tell you, death can be extremely fake. The man dies all the time. It never takes. 

So there’s something poignant about the role Paul Walker’s death plays in this little boy’s fantasy land of infinite power, control and money as the one thing these masters of the universe could not control, that for all of their money and power they could not change. 

Dom ends the best entry in the Fast and Furious series by eulogizing his brother Pablo in a way that’s no less powerful for being incredibly cheesy and sentimental in that deeply imitable Fast and Furious fashion. 

“I used to say I live my life a quarter mile at a time. And I think that's why we were brothers, because you did too. No matter where you are, whether it's a quarter-mile away or halfway across the world...you'll always be with me, and you'll always be my brother” are Dom’s final words to  Brian.

They had me bawling. This silly series of loud movies about large men in automobiles made me cry. 

I’ve only seen two of the films I’ll be writing about in the weeks ahead: Fate of the Furious and Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw. I quite like the spin-off but I hear less than rapturous things about F9 and F10. 

Oh well. This series has already accomplished so much more than anyone imagined possible. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that it apparently hit a wall creatively as it became the rare franchise to break into double digits. 

When you have that level of quantity, quality can’t help but suffer.